Jon Shafer's At the Gates

At the Gates is an indie strategy game from Jon Shafer, designer of Civilization 5. You are a dark age lord building a kingdom to replace the crumbling Roman Empire. Manage your clans, explore the landscape around you, harvest its resources, and build a mighty economic and military machine.

v1.0.0.1 is now available in the new 'unstable' branch on Steam. This isn't the full v1.0.1 outlined in the update plan but it includes a few preliminary important fixes that will be rolled out to the main branch once it's been tested a bit. It took longer than expected to get this first patch out since the two big fixes (the out of memory crash and crashing on launch in Turkish) were both much tougher than expected, and on top of this I had to completely rewrite the game's build and publishing script post-launch (the Mono version of the game needed some critical surgery right before the release and the process for uploading builds had to be mostly redone from scratch as a result).

On the plus side we've made a ton of progress on the memory issues, so crashes related to this should be much less common now. The executable location might be off for the Linux version unstable branch - if it doesn't launch just go back to the default branch and I'll have this fixed early next week. Once we've verified v1.0.0.1 is working for folks it'll be pushed to the default branch.

With this annoying stuff out of the way now updates should roll out much more smoothly going forward. The new target date for v1.0.1 is February 15 on the unstable branch and February 22 for full release.

- Jon

Jon Shafer's At the Gates

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Update Plan

The purpose of this thread is to keep everyone up-to-date regarding plans for future work to be done on AtG. In this top post I'll keep an updated copy of my project tasklist so you can see the exact agenda I'm working from.
Note that the plan below can ...

Several updates are planned for At the Gates and each is outlined in brief below. You can also find a copy of the full tasklist for the game in this Steam forums thread. To report bugs or receive technical assistance we recommend visiting the official Conifer forums[forums.conifergames.com].

First off I want to say despite not recommending the game i do enjoy it and it has a lot of promise if the developer continues to work on it. It has a lot of inovative systems to build off of and the early game does provide a fun challenge with lots of interesting choices.

The main problem is the game feels more like it should have been an early access title than a full release. There are a LOT of bugs and issues with the UI. Some of the trained classes do not work properly or have incorrect information in the display. Balance issues are a problem as well. As you get later in the game, the balance of classes and choices is broken from OP classes (such as coin maker). Diplomacy choices are barebones and seem to have little consequence as the computer doesn't really expand or branch out their areas aggressively.

If you don't mind buying into a product that has a lot of bugs and balancing issues to solve At the Gates is a good start to something special. Hopefully the devs continue to iron out the kinks. To everyone else, I'd wait until future updates solve the problems at hand or a sale come around.

Interesting Concept but the AI basically it totally feels like this should have been a Early Access release since it isn't anywhere near a complete game. I can declare war but never end it and I can't "win" satisfying way vs another faction because if you pillage you can't actually take over and they don't rebuild. If you play long enough all of the AIs are noting but depleted/pillaged farms and mines.

While it might be a promising idea it isn't a game and it isn't near complete. Don't waste your money.

Lot's of potential for an incredibly unique style of game. I don't regret spending 90% of release cost at all, even though there are still quite a few game-play issues to work out.

Just one thing though, could we squash the trend of putting people's names before the game? I have to search my entire Steam library every time I want to play this just because some guy imagines that his name means something more to me than my name means to him. Knock it off, it's uncool.

Is there any chance we can get the caravan food expoit (i.e., food converted directly into turns) fixed sooner rather than later? This really makes the game unchallenging, and thus much less fun. I've tried just not buying food from the caravan, but it ...

Can't really figure out what was going on. Can't figure out how to attack bandits.
Can't figure out how to forage.
Can't figure out basic supplies.
Can't figure out basic roles or balance of tasks.
It's a poor mess.

The game crashing on launch when starting the game on a system with Turkish as the OS language. It's something we're looking into now, but given the nature of the issue it may or may not be fixed within 2 weeks so you may want to consider requesting a ref...